Hacker News: roughly

New comment by roughly in "It's hard to justify buying a Framework 12"

roughly — Fri, 29 May 2026 17:56:50 +0000

A truck will always be a worse car than a car, the question is do you need a car or a truck? If you need a car, get a Neo, if you need a truck, get a Framework. They’re not competing past that initial question.

New comment by roughly in "Use boring languages with LLMs"

roughly — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:37:42 +0000

> Times change, and I work more in R&D space than on legacy codebases, but I still ask it to write something in Python then convert it to the actual language on occasion. I don't know if I'm tricking the context window, forcing alternate pathways, or both, but it works.

My experience with LLMs is that they perform best in one of two modes - either one carefully scoped context or translating between two different contexts without modification - so this modality lines up with that fairly nicely: think in the programming language the LLM thinks "best" in and then translate that to the one you want.

That said, there's often enough structural and conceptual differences between languages that a direct "transliteration" between, say, Python and Go is going to result in some fairly crummy Go, so I'm curious what you see in terms of the fidelity of that translation - do you mostly get "Python written in Go," or does the LLM really do a proper conversion from one language to the other?

New comment by roughly in "Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union"

roughly — Tue, 26 May 2026 20:14:31 +0000

No, we're talking economics here - picture a spherical human in a perfect marketplace

New comment by roughly in "White Rabbit – sub-nanosecond synchronization for large distributed systems"

roughly — Mon, 25 May 2026 03:52:27 +0000

Haven't dug in on the technicals, but this is coming out of CERN, it looks like - and in that light, the links to "We're hiring" on that page almost feel like a flex...

New comment by roughly in "The Art of Money Getting"

roughly — Sat, 23 May 2026 17:19:32 +0000

I'm highly agreeable, and I've had to learn not to be. Knowing when to challenge people - "strategic non-agreeableness" - is extremely valuable. I've also made most of my career off being somewhat neurotic - I've described the core of my job as "finding things to panic about before they happen" (I went on Prozac a while back and caused an incident in the first couple weeks during uptake because my anxiety didn't trigger about something during a deploy). As far as extroversion - friends of mine who are genuine extroverts about went crazy during the pandemic, while I and a few other introvert friends got some of our best work ever done during that period. There's a spectrum - you can't be a misanthrope, but being able to take (and stand) quiet time to focus on a problem is absolutely an asset. With regards to conscientiousness, this often manifests in the workplace as an unwillingness to deviate from the plan when circumstances demand it and a preference for adding process as a kind of panacea for any kind of failure or delay, and at risk of offending the more conscientious among us, I have not found that a recipe for success.

New comment by roughly in "The FBI Wants 'Near Real-Time' Access to US License Plate Readers"

roughly — Sat, 23 May 2026 15:55:05 +0000

Unfortunately, “SCOTUS previously declared this unconstitutional” doesn’t have quite the same sense of finality it used to these days.

New comment by roughly in "Chewing gum restores dad's taste and smell years after Covid"

roughly — Thu, 21 May 2026 22:50:16 +0000

Two notes on this - one is that smell and taste are the earliest senses we have. The first thing organisms began to sense about their external environments were chemical gradients, and that’s in essence what smell and taste are doing.

The second is that what they’re doing is _fantastically_ complex from a physical standpoint compared to sight and vision - sight is the detection of photons of various wavelengths and energy levels; hearing is the detection of vibrations. Smell and taste are molecular docking problems: they are the detection and identification of the actual structures (or at least substructures) of molecules. The closest we have to that is mass spectrometry, which basically involves flinging molecules hard enough to break them and weighing the parts.

New comment by roughly in "London Mayor Blocks Palantir"

roughly — Thu, 21 May 2026 17:12:17 +0000

Because until recently that was part of the sales pitch. The post-WW2 political order was that the US Govt was the security guarantor for the "western world," which meant countries allied with the US traded an almost unparalleled security guarantee for things like dollar hegemony and trade policies they probably wouldn't have acceded to otherwise. The Iraq war severely strained that bargain, and Trump's effectively broken it, but for the entire latter half of the 20th century, "this company is part of the American Military-Industrial Technosphere" was why you did business with them.

New comment by roughly in "GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories"

roughly — Wed, 20 May 2026 06:37:23 +0000

Many years ago there was an attack that went around that used the server’s BMC as an entry point. Thing is, BMCs are universally shit, so as part of the attack, the attackers also fixed a bunch of bugs so their connection could persist. I was working in hardware management at the time, and when we heard about that, we all gave that one a hard think…

New comment by roughly in "U.S. DOJ demands Apple and Google unmask over 100k users of car-tinkering app"

roughly — Fri, 15 May 2026 18:52:36 +0000

> I think people should have the freedom to do what they want; if you want to have a truck that has horrible exhaust, fine, but we'll have it piped back into your cab for you to breathe instead of the people behind you, and if you want a car that sounds like a thousand go-carts racing down the street fine, but it'll be through headphones destroying your hearing every time you hit the gas.

Hey congrats, you discovered Society! This is what all those rules and shit are all about - your impact on other people, and their impact on you! It turns out that just saying “people should be able to do what they want” doesn’t actually solve anything, because other people also exist, and some of them are you!

New comment by roughly in "Why senior developers fail to communicate their expertise"

roughly — Tue, 12 May 2026 18:20:39 +0000

This is well-put, but the problem comes when you’ve got leadership looking at what appears to be a fully-functioning version of the product that the market is clearly indicating to them is sufficient to drive revenue. Budgeting the 6 weeks or whatever to translate from “the working version” to “the trustworthy version” is a hard pitch.

This is why part of a senior developer’s job is designing and developing the fast version in a way that, if it goes into production, won’t burn the building down. This is the subtle art of development: recognizing where the line is for “good enough” to ship fast without jeopardizing the long-term health of the company. This is also the part that AI is absolutely atrocious at - vibe code is fast, that’s the pitch, but it’s also basically disposable (or it’s not fast - I see all you “exhaustive spec/comprehensive tests/continuous iteration” types, and I see your timelines, too). If you can convince the org that’s the tradeoff, great, but I had a hell of a time doing it back when code was moving at human speed, and now you just strapped rockets onto the shitty part of the system and are trying to convince leadership that rocket-speed is too fast.

New comment by roughly in "A lost ancient script reveals how writing as we know it began"

roughly — Tue, 12 May 2026 03:12:57 +0000

There are two relatively recent books that dig in on the relationship between humans and governments or states and the degree to which these were less of a linear history and more of an ongoing negotiation - Against the Grain by James C Scott focuses on early states and their semi-regular failures, and The Dawn of Everything by Graeber and Wengrow talk about the ongoing process of power negotiations between the putative leadership class and the citizenry. Both emphasize the same thing: that retrenchments against the state were a regular occurrence, and that the citizens of a given ruling group would not infrequently challenge, abolish, or abandon the state if the rulers overreached. The sudden disappearance of a script that was used for the purposes of tracking ownership and accounts would fit with this view, especially in light of even more modern reactions to attempts by the state to codify relationships for, eg, tax purposes, or just generally for control.

New comment by roughly in "All means are fair except solving the problem"

roughly — Fri, 08 May 2026 22:25:06 +0000

Brother, have I got bad news for you about all the places outside your door.

New comment by roughly in "BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets"

roughly — Wed, 06 May 2026 20:53:36 +0000

BYD's direction was largely at the behest of the Chinese government, who were willing to demand things of BYD in exchange for that protectionism, instead of wringing their hands and saying "nothing you can do about the market" while simultaneously propping up industries of national strategic significance.

New comment by roughly in "BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets"

roughly — Wed, 06 May 2026 19:28:48 +0000

And, more to the point, BYD exists because the CCP has been aggressively protectionist of its domestic companies and has been strongly involved in growing, supporting, and protecting its domestic industry to ensure it has one. BYD is not a cautionary tale about protectionism, it's a sales pitch for it.

New comment by roughly in "Instagram Encrypted Messaging Ends on Friday, May 8"

roughly — Tue, 05 May 2026 17:15:08 +0000

I’m curious if this was built off the work Moxie did with them back in the day, but as I recall Facebook Messenger had E2EE built off Signal’s technology a decade or so back, and the zeitgeist back then was at least a little bit less user hostile.

New comment by roughly in "Agents for financial services and insurance"

roughly — Tue, 05 May 2026 16:08:05 +0000

I can believe that. Gambler’s Ruin gets costly when you’ve actually got money on the line.

New comment by roughly in "US healthcare marketplaces shared citizenship and race data with ad tech giants"

roughly — Mon, 04 May 2026 18:51:29 +0000

Many of those countries have mechanisms by which one can express their preferences earlier in the process, ones which have been successfully used to pivot major political parties in new and unexpected directions, although those mechanisms are more complicated than just showing up at the end and whining about the results, so usually it's only motivated individuals and entities which leverage them.

New comment by roughly in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

roughly — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:55:06 +0000

Backup cameras are used in a very narrow set of the circumstances that car mirrors are intended for. They augment mirrors.

New comment by roughly in "Mercedes-Benz commits to bringing back physical buttons"

roughly — Sun, 03 May 2026 18:29:23 +0000

No, screens cannot replace mirrors, but we’re doing it anyway.